Award-winning educator leaving Seattle schools after 36 years

Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, April 27, 2008

Washington Middle School jazz band teacher Robert Knatt, a 36-year veteran of Seattle schools, works with his students before they depart for the Reno Jazz Festival.

Washington Middle School jazz band teacher Robert Knatt, a 36-year veteran of Seattle schools, works with his students before they depart for the Reno Jazz Festival.

Photo: Joshua Trujillo/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Under the Needle: Jazz teacher Knatt ending career on upbeat

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The story Robert Knatt likes to tell, the saw that hasn't dulled with overuse, involves two of his talented former students at Washington Middle School. The more dominant one always grabbed the music written for first or lead trumpet.

The second, a quiet and close friend of the first, always settled for the No. 2 sheet. This continued for two years. But in eighth grade, after summer vacation, the second trumpet went to the teacher and said he'd composed a chart during the break and he wondered if the jazz band might play it.

"It was two trumpets battling each other," Knatt said, smiling. "The minute I listened to it, I got it. I know why he composed it."

Not long afterward, the jazz band played it in a festival. To the crowd's cheers, players traded riffs. The student who always accepted No. 2 was "sending punches back. He was going to grab that respect through the music."

A week later, back in class and working on a new piece with the school's award-winning band, Knatt got a surprise: Unprovoked, No. 1 trumpet walked over to No. 2 with the new chart and said, "Hey, why don't you play No. 1 this time?"

To Knatt, the story surprises and delights. It shows heart, sacrifice and emotion distilled.

Like jazz itself.

And it continues to remind him how much he learned from students as he moves through his 36th and final year teaching jazz at Seattle middle schools -- first in a portable classroom at South Shore and then, since 1991, at Washington.

"What I didn't tell them when I got hired in May 1972," one of Seattle's most decorated teachers said as his students prepared for a competition Saturday in Reno, "is that I would have done it for free."

Knatt grew up in New Iberia, La. When he was a child, his cousin moved in to stay with the family. She was four years older and involved in high school band, drama, student government -- just about everything. To measure up, Knatt joined the band.

The director, Leslie D. Bennett, became a surrogate father. A surrogate warden, too. Every day, on weekends, in practice, after school, as Knatt would practice the French horn, Bennett would demand: "Do it again. Do it again."

"He was a little bit hard on me," Knatt said, sitting in the band room at Washington, his nearby office crowded with music and competition trophies. "He didn't take what you wanted to give. He wanted more."

Even when Knatt got a full music scholarship at Grambling State, even when he made the legendary marching band with his freshman audition -- a far tougher task than making the school's accomplished athletic teams -- Leslie didn't give.

He told Knatt he'd likely fail. So who was the first person Knatt went back home to see when he graduated in 1972, already having secured a teaching job in Seattle?

"I walked up to him and I said, 'Hey, I proved you wrong,' " Knatt said. "He just smiled and said, 'Sit down.' He told me he knew I'd make it, if only to prove him wrong.

"You know, it worked."

It's still working. Knatt's love for teaching jazz is as serious as Miles Davis' chops; his standards are as rigid as a fence post. Students sign contracts upon entry. They must work hard, respect one another and earn what they get. They cry and get empathy but no change in reality. They con and find no suckers.

But when they play with heart, when they meet their end of the deal and when their horns, drums and pianos speak the truth behind the notes, then they get the coveted head bob, the closed eyes, the smile and the "that's it."

This is a middle school program, after all, that's considered among the nation's finest, a perennial winner in the Reno Jazz Festival, the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival and others. This is the program that supplies the richest ore for Clarence Acox Jr.'s esteemed Garfield High School jazz band.

For the next three months, the 59-year-old Knatt will be too busy to reminisce. Last week was the final practice before Reno and the students still didn't have the three competition numbers quite right. He singled out the trumpets for "imbalance," asked them to play the same seven notes five times in a row until it was to his liking.

"I hear the notes," he said to the student as they gaze and wait for approval. "But I don't hear the emotion."

He worked them on the coda, the final measure of "Spring Can Hang You Up the Most."